JULY, AUGUST, AND SEPTEMBER
In after years Susan was often obliged to bring before her memory
very vividly the conditions which could have been overwhelming enough
to have driven her into marrying Joe Houghton; for there were times
when nothing seemed to explain or justify it.
There had been the mortgage held by Joe, covering the full value of
her widowed mother's house and land; his Shylock determination to
have his price, which was her hand in marriage; his ruthlessness in
having her voted out of her school at the end of May, in order to
force her to yield to him; her mother's speechless grief at the bare
thought of leaving the home which held all her memories of her dead
mate; her sisters' unfitness for earning their own living in any
other way than in domestic service on a farm. Whichever way she had
turned, there had seemed to be no escape for her. Every possible
avenue had seemed closed, with whips and scorpions beating her back.
It was not for herself that she had succumbed to the pressure of
gaunt Want. She could always, somehow, somewhere, have earned a
living for herself, and had she been unable to do so, far easier
would it have been to starve and die than to marry a man she
despised. But that comparatively simple solution of her difficulty
had not been open to her. She must live and take care of her
helpless mother and sisters, made helpless through her; for had it
not been for her, surely her father would still be with them, to
support and comfort them. It had been she who had brought shame and
grief and want upon them. She, then, must stand by them and see them
through. Would the great sacrifice she was making act as an antidote
in her soul to the degradation of such a marriage?
Well, even if she herself must "sink i' the scale," she could not see
her mother die before her eyes in pining for her home; her sisters,
who had lived and worked for her all her life, forced to the
humiliation and slavish labour of domestic service on a farm. She
had always believed that circumstances could not crush the valiant
soul; that one could rise above and master them if one would. But
the conditions which at that time had closed in upon her had seemed
to force her to the bitter choice between saving herself and
sacrificing her mother and sisters.
She had known from the first that she would not sacrifice them. Her
decision had been delayed only by her desperate efforts to save
herself as well.
It had been while she was thus battling for her own soul's salvation
that Sidney Houghton, never dreaming of his brother's very commercial
courtship of the school teacher of White Oak Station, had approached
Mrs. Schrekengust with a renewal of the offer he had made to her
husband: if she and her three daughters would move to the comfortable
little home which he would give them over in Fokendauqua, forty miles
distant, he would take upon himself all their debts here in
Reifsville and see to it that they should never come to want.
To Susan, the amazing spectacle of her mother's heart-broken
submission to this proposition, in the face of her hitherto deep and
wordless grief at the mere mention of leaving her home in Reifsville,
had had in it something mysteriously sinister. Why had her father
denied to her that it was Sidney Houghton who had made this offer to
him? He had died with a lie on his lips!--he who had all his life
been so painfully truthful. Not for gain, not for any material
thing, would he have told a lie. What had been back of his apostasy?
What was back of her mother's acquiescence to a thing which was
tantamount to signing her own death warrant?
An idea had dawned upon Susan which she had instantly rejected as
being altogether incredible. Even Sidney Houghton, weak and false as
she knew him to be, would scarcely be capable of the perfidy of
threatening her mother (whose holiest religion, like that of all
women of her class, was Respectability) with the exposure of the
secret shame of her daughter--victimized by himself!--unless Mrs.
Schrekengust would at once move away with her family from the
precarious vicinity of his home.
And yet, impossible as such baseness seemed, even for Sidney
Houghton, what lesser necessity than the maintaining of their ghastly
secret could so have coerced her mother?
A hot fury of rebellion had risen in Susan's heart against the
humiliation of being thus driven away for the sake of Sidney's
security and peace of mind. If nothing were now left but to choose
between marrying Joe or having her mother suffer and surely die from
being beholden to Sidney Houghton for a home and a livelihood in a
distant town, could she hesitate? She had the human weakness to feel
that there would be actually a drop of bitter consolation for her in
thus defying her betrayer and going boldly to live in the very shadow
of his home; to be hourly in his sight; to pass daily to and fro
before the very eyes of his wife!
Her decision had been swiftly made.
On the day when Sidney had called by appointment to give over to her
mother the deed to the Fokendauqua house and lot and receive in
exchange the mortgaged Reifsville property, he had been met with the
announcement that Mrs. Schrekengust could not now fulfil her part of
the bargain to which she had previously agreed, inasmuch as her
daughter, Susan, could not, under the present circumstances, be
enticed away to Fokendauqua--seeing she no longer made her home with
her mother--having married Joseph Houghton that very morning, July
28th, and gone to live at the tenant-farmer's cottage at White Oak
Farm; and that therefore there was now no reason why they should
leave Reifsville; for Joseph Houghton had that morning, before the
marriage ceremony, given them a clear deed to their house and land.
How Sidney had received this astounding information Susan could only
guess from the incoherent account of it she had received later from
her mother and sisters.
"Och, Susie, he took it hard!"
"He turned awful white and there for a while he couldn't har'ly
speak!"
"I believe, Susie, he likes you _yet_!"
"He ast me," said Mrs. Schrekengust, "what fur did I leave you marry
a fellah like Joe that ain't worthy to tie your shoes yet! And I
answered him, 'Yes, what fur did I ever leave you, Sidney Houghton,
keep comp'ny with her!--you that wasn't fit neither to _lick_ her
shoes yet!' He turned whiter'n ever when I sayed that. But he ast
us what we thought could have _made_ you marry Joe, seein' as it
wasn't in nature for a girl like you to love sich a fellah. And I
sayed that now you had to be glad fur any decent husband; and that if
Joe knowed all, he wouldn't think you was good enough fur _him_."
"But Sidney he wouldn't have it no other way," put in Lizzie, "than
that you'd throwed yourself away."
"But I tol' him," added Mrs. Schrekengust, "you had a'ready throwed
yourself away as fur as you could on _him_."
"Yes, Mom she come back at him fierce!" said Lizzie.
"And he took it that meek and calm, Susie, that it wondered me!" put
in Addie.
Susan had no conscientious qualms in marrying Joe without "confessing
her past," inasmuch as she asked no questions as to his past.
"He, too, was married before," she reasoned; for she persisted in
believing that before high heaven, or "whatever gods there be," she
had been Sidney Houghton's wife.
She felt sure that if Joe had been a man whom she could have found it
possible to love, she would have felt impelled to tell him of her
unmarried motherhood. But he had bought her for a price, as
shamelessly as he would have bought a cow or a horse! Therefore, her
past, like his, was her own.
In the early months of her married life, she was, however, never
without a guilty sense of wronging her husband in her heart by her
secret loathing of him; and she tried conscientiously to atone by
scrupulously performing what seemed to her her wifely obligations;
and by the devoted care she gave to his child; submitting to many
things which otherwise she would not have borne--his little
contemptible, maddening meannesses about expenditures, his refusal to
hire any housework, his exactions of services from her such as he
would not have dared to ask of any hired servant or housekeeper.
When it was too late--when both his exactions and her submission had
become a habit with them not easy to break--she realized that she had
begun all wrong.
"For if from the first I had taken a stand against such a régime, I
could have carried the day!"
"By the time you learn, through bitter mistakes, how to live," she
often reflected in after years, "your knowledge is of no use to you
except to make you wild with regret!"
She had made Joe promise (and she could absolutely depend on his
word) that he would never reveal to Josie in the years to come that
she was not his own mother.
"I'll get that out of it, anyway--a son's love for his mother," she
had told herself.
For Susan had learned from her doctor, over a year ago, that she
could never bear another child. Had she not known this, no other
considerations would have been strong enough to have forced her to
marry Joe. An instinctive conviction that it would be a crime to let
a child be born of a loveless marriage would have held her back.
Susan's intuitive ethics, it will be observed, were not those
commonly held by respectable people.
The "bitter consolation" she had anticipated in defying Sidney
Houghton's efforts to get her away from tie neighbourhood of his
home, and coming to live at his very door, was postponed by his
departure from home immediately after her marriage. He left, with
his wife, child, and nurse, for a month at Newport.
"I see through that move!" Joe declared to Susan one day over their
mid-day dinner in the cottage kitchen, Josie in a high chair at
Susan's side. "They're too stuck-up, him and her, to take notice to
_my_ wife! So, to save their faces, they go off! Sich extravagance!
Payin' _ho_tel board when they're got a big, cool place like theirn
to stay at!"
"Your sister-in-law seems to care so little for her baby, I'm
surprised she takes him with her when she goes away. He would be
quite as well off here alone with his nurse as he is with her."
"Right you are! _She_ don't give him no attention; nothin' like what
you give to Josie, and him your step-child yet."
"We're to forget that he is not my own child," Susan reminded him.
"But Sid _he's_ anyhow crazy about his kid," continued Joe. "He
would not let him here alone with that dopplig nurse girl! You see,
Susan, Sid ain't takin' no chances on that there baby dyin' and my
Josie inheritin' White Oak Farm!"
Susan recognized it as very characteristic of Sidney to have run away
for a month from a situation which he must ultimately face.
From New York came a gorgeous wedding present from Sidney and his
wife; a most unsuitable gift for a tenant-farmer's menage: a huge
satin-lined case filled with every possible form of table
silver--knives, forks, teaspoons, tablespoons, dessert spoons,
bouillon spoons, orange spoons, after-dinner coffee spoons, oyster
forks, fruit knives, bread-and-butter knives.
Joe gloated over the moneyed value of it, even while denouncing his
brother's reckless and senseless extravagance.
"Put it good away; it would get stole if it was knew we had such
grand stuff around. You see, Susan, you never was used to such
things and don't know their walue; but I was, when I was a kid livin'
at home, before my father died."
Susan did not think it worth while to tell him how "used to such
things" she had become during her years at school, through the
friendships she had made with girls from homes so unlike her own as
to have seemed to her a wonderland of luxury and ease and refinement.
But she was glad that Joe would not expect her to use this silver.
It was promptly locked away in the attic.
From the moment that Susan had made up her mind to marry Joe her
heart had desperately fixed itself upon the one compensation, besides
her family's safety, which she might hope to find in her
situation--the care and love of the baby. But since affection is not
a thing to be commanded at will, perhaps the very intensity of her
determination to lay hold, here, upon comfort and even blessedness,
defeated her desire. Josie, although healthy, pretty, of average
intelligence, and at times both cunning and interesting, proved to be
peevish, exacting, and selfish to a degree that seemed to Susan quite
hopeless. She could not, no matter how hard she tried, warm up to
him. She was sure that if he had responded in the least to her
overtures he would have won her immediately and completely, no matter
what his trying faults of disposition. But nothing she could do
seemed to awaken in the child any affection for her. She would have
concluded that he had no heart, but for the fact that he was so
extremely attached to his father.
Joe, who was morbidly jealous of Josie's affection, instead of being
troubled by his persistence in repelling his step-mother's advances,
seemed to gloat over it. While he would have resented her least
neglect of the boy, he seemed to begrudge her the natural reward of
her faithful care.
"Come here to your pop, Josie--see what I got fur you!" he would
entice the child away from her the moment his jealous watchfulness
detected in Josie any sign of fondness for her.
Josie very quickly learned to associate a rough repulsion of his
"mother" with the reward of a lozenge or a ride "upsy-daisy" on his
father's foot.
Susan foresaw that when it came to questions of discipline Joe would
always side with the child against her. She feared that it would
require more patience and diplomacy than she could ever hope to
command to deal with the problem.
Joe's jealousy was not confined to his child. It early became
manifest that he would brook no rival in Susan's regard; such, for
instance, as her love of books, the one love left to her out of the
wreck of her life. He wished and expected her to be interested in
nothing else in the world but his comfort and welfare and that of his
boy. She soon found herself instinctively putting her reading out of
sight at his approach and busying herself with house- or needle-work,
in order to spare herself the morose, sullen silence, lasting
sometimes a whole day, with which he would signify his displeasure
when he found her reading; or his tirades against the sort of books
she "wasted her time on." All novels were lumped together as
abominations. Poetry was "for Sunday afternoons if you got to read
it, but certainly not for busy week-days." Science baffled him. He
once found her reading (or trying to read) Darwin's "Origin of
Species," and when he had demanded to be told what it was about and
had heard her reply, he waxed truly indignant. "The stuff yous
simple females'll swallow yet!"
She tried to tell him that the evolution of man from a lower species
was no longer an hypothesis, but an historical fact, and she read him
some of the evidences of that fact.
But he wasn't impressed. "I can't pitcher it to myself. Can you
pitcher it to yourself, a man's ever havin' been in such a form?
It's a lie! Don't fill your head with such foolishness!"
"But it is the truth."
"No," he firmly denied it, "I can't pitcher to myself a man's ever
having no other form. Why, no person in White Oak Station believes
such a thing as that there!"
"Must I believe nothing except what the people of White Oak Station
believe?" smiled Susan.
"You're safer to."
"Why?"
"What's the use of thinkin' different from other folks?"
"What's the use of thinking just _like_ other people?"
"Och, well," he gave it up, exhausted with such unwonted mental
strenuousness, "have your own way. Think it, then--but _keep it to
yourself_. I don't want folks 'round here sayin' I married a crazy
woman!"
When just a month after Susan's marriage her mother died very
suddenly at the end of August, from heart failure, Susan's wild
rebellion against Fate, that she should have sacrificed herself so
needlessly, turned itself speedily into a great indignation against
herself; against that fatal weakness in her character which seemed
always to inhibit her from wrestling with the knotty places in her
life and conquering them.
"I've let myself be shoved about like a puppet!"
If one could only have the courage always to do what, in spite of
threatened disaster, one saw was the only true thing to do--and then
trust to Life to right it!
But of course only great souls were large enough and strong enough
for such high heroism.
Joe was not unsympathetic for her grief for her mother. But he had a
grotesque way of commingling his gentler feelings with his dominating
sordidness.
"I guess, now, Susan, you'll be wantin' me to buy you one of these
here stylish crape wails; ain't?--you bein' so much for dressin'
stylish that way. But I took notice you didn't wear one of 'em fur
your pop when he died; I guess because you couldn't afford one; for I
heard a'ready that they cost awful expensive--them crape wails. And
I hold that since you didn't wear one fur your pop, it wouldn't look
according, your wearing one fur your mom."
"Mennonites don't wear mourning."
"Yes, well, but you ain't no Mennonite."
"None of us will wear mourning," she reassured him.
His relief made him beam upon her benignly. "You show your good
sense, Susan. Fur it would be a awful waste to let all them good
clo'es you're got a'ready and go buy new black ones; ain't, it would?"
Susan vaguely wondered what it was going to be like when the clothes
she now had were worn out and she was obliged to buy new ones. Her
work as housekeeper and child's nurse was harder, more distasteful,
and involved longer hours than had ever been the case with school
teaching; yet she had nothing for it that she could call her own;
nothing except what Joe saw fit to give her. Thus far he had never
voluntarily offered her a dollar; and when she had one day asked him
for money, he had inquired what she wanted it for. It had been for
some household expenses, not for herself. He had given it to her
grudgingly, mistrustfully, as though he suspected her of a design to
defraud him.
Such was the chaos and horror of her soul in confronting, now, the
needless sacrifice she had made in marrying Joe that the harrowing
funeral orgie and all its gruesome accompaniments drove her almost
into unrestrained hysteria. First, there was the elderly woman,
unknown to the family with a passion for funerals, who had walked in
from the country, five miles, "to view the remains of the deceased."
"I didn't know her in life, but I'd like to see her in death," she
devoutly explained--which so moved the hearts of Lizzie and Addie
that they made her stay "for dinner."
Then the preacher's hypocritical tones and meaningless stock phrases
which made Susan grind her teeth in impotent rebellion--"portals of
memory," "life's peaceful waters," "God's smiles," "the Other Shore,"
the awful hymn droned out a line at a time alternately by the
preacher and the people:
We'll miss you from our home, dear mother,
We'll miss you from your place;
A shadow over our lives is cast;
We'll miss the sunshine of your face.
Our hearts are bound with sorrow,
Yet the thought comes with each sigh,
She is safe with God's dear angels;
We shall meet her by and by.
And finally Lizzie's controversary with the undertaker over the palms
which stood grouped at the head of the coffin and which the
undertaker was going to load on his truck and take away with him.
"No, you don't!" Lizzie indignantly stopped him, right in the
presence of their assembled kindred, friends, and neighbours, "you
ain't to claim back _all_ them palms! One third of them palms is
_mine_--and them goes with Mom along!"
They had almost had a tug of war about it over the coffin.
Susan's struggles to keep herself in hand through the nightmare of it
all ended in a nervous collapse which left her prostrated for weeks
with a continuous, unconquerable pain in her head just at the base of
her brain.
Joe's genuine alarm, his unexpected sympathy for her suffering, were
a surprising revelation to her. She had not thought him capable of
real tenderness except for his boy. The extent of his feeling for
her was indicated by his surprisingly suggesting one day, with
evident intent to find something that would catch her interest, that
perhaps she might like to learn to drive his roadster? She had
several times requested to be allowed to do so and he had always
refused.
"If you learn oncet you'll be wantin' to _go_ all the time and you'd
let your housework too much. Gasoline costs too expensive to be used
unnecessary," he had said.
But now he told her that perhaps it would after all be an economical
move and save a lot of his valuable time to let _her_ make the
occasional necessary trips to town.
He stipulated, however, that she must exercise self-restraint in the
use of such a precious commodity as gasoline.
Susan's relation with Sidney, though it had not been sanctified by
society or religion, had yet had in it such elements of beauty, joy,
sacredness, that it had seemed at times to justify itself--as her
entirely respectable marriage could not do, now that its motive, her
mother's welfare, was removed. It was now that she felt herself to
be "living in sin," as she had never felt while she loved; and when
her mother's death removed the necessity of her immolation, she
passionately longed to escape from her ignominy.
She even went to the length of suggesting to her sisters, some weeks
after her mother's funeral, that if they had courage enough to give
back to Joe their home in Reifsville, go with her to the city and
open a boarding-house, she would leave her husband (whom she had
married only to save her mother the grief of losing her home), and
would help them to earn a comfortable living. Of course if they
would not consent to give back their property to Joe, she could not
leave him; it would be going back on her bargain; it would be like
stealing; but if they would consent----
But the consternation, even horror, of their faces at this, to them,
disreputable proposition, told her, before they answered her, that
she could never persuade them to such a step.
"Och, Susie, are you a loose woman that you talk so light about
leaving your Mister! Who ever heard the likes!" exclaimed Lizzie.
The three sisters were sitting together on the front porch of the
Reifsville cottage, Susan having driven over from White Oak in the
roadster after the early farm supper, to put before them her plan.
"It's because I'm not a loose woman that I think I ought to leave
Joe," she tried to explain. "I know how queer it sounds to you and
Addie for me to say I think it's my living with him that's
immoral--but that's what I think."
"But he's your _Mister_, Susie! How you talk, anyhow!"
"No, he is not my husband!" she suddenly cried out, passionately.
"He's my keeper, my owner, and I'm his chattel! I can't stand it! I
can't bear it!"
Her sisters stared in amazement upon her shrinking, shivering body,
her trembling lips, her white face.
"Don't he use you nice, Susie?" asked Addie, anxiously.
"For Mother's sake I could have borne it, and if she bad lived longer
I might have gotten used to it. But now it seems so senseless to go
on enduring such a life! I'm young--I'm not twenty-one yet. To
think of living all the rest of my life with him! Oh, Lizzie, I
can't! I just can't!"
"But what's the matter of him? He seems awful nice and common toward
what his stuck-up brother is!" argued Lizzie. "And he makes you a
good purwider, don't he, Susie?"
"It's what he is, not what he does!" cried Susan, despairingly.
"You knowed what he was when you said Yes to him. And even fur Mom's
sake you hadn't ought to have said Yes unlest you knowed you could
stand him pretty good."
"I know that now. I know I made a terrible mistake. I was an idiot!
There's no excuse for me! But before it's too late, Lizzie," Susan
pleaded, "I want to mend my mistake!"
"It is too late," Lizzie pronounced. "Would it be treatin' Joe right
and fair to up and leave him and disgrace him so before all the
folks, when you ain't got no good reason except that he mebby
kreistles* you a little?"
* Disgusts.
Susan had not thought of that--of how unfair it would be to Joe.
"But he wouldn't deserve any sympathy," she argued, piteously, "for
he backed me into a corner and forced me to marry him--on pain of our
losing our home--when he knew I did not care for him and did not want
to marry him."
"But you did marry him," said Addie, conclusively. "And what's
done's done."
"Yes," corroborated Lizzie, "as it is, so it is, and that ends it."
"Why should it end it? It shan't end it!" cried Susan, fighting for
her very soul. "You must help me to get out of it! You have helped
me all my life--and I never needed your help more than I need it now!"
"We never helped you to go wrong, Susie--to disgrace and shame us!"
Lizzie maintained. "And this here thing you're astin us to do--to
help you leave your Mister--just like a woman that's got loose morals
that way--it wouldn't be right!"
"It seems to me you're got it good," said Addie, "with that there
pretty little boy and this here automobile car of Mister's and him so
well-fixed and all, so's you ain't got to worry!"
"You offer me a stone for bread," responded Susan, hopelessly, as she
rose to leave them. "You would think it right for me to go away from
him if he beat or starved me. You can't see that one's heart and
mind and soul may be starved and torn every hour, every minute! You
can't see!"
But even as she spoke, Susan realized, with a vague pain in her heart
for her sisters, that perhaps the greater tragedy was theirs--in that
they could not see.